Victor Pavlov showed off Ukraine’s newest and most versatile weapon: a battery-powered land robot.
The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.
“This is what modern warfare looks like. Armies everywhere will have to robotise,” said Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year and the conflict – Europe’s biggest since 1945 – has seen an astonishing transformation of battlefield weapons and tactics. The war has become a technological contest, fought not with expensive tanks but with cheap and expendable drones that can deliver bombs with deadly accuracy.
Ukraine’s drone expertise is now highly sought after amid the US-Israeli war against Iran. Last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed 10-year defence agreements with several Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors. They can shoot down long-range kamikaze Shahed drones, used by Tehran in its attacks on its neighbours, and by Moscow.
It is a bad idea, but Pandora’s box cannot be closed. We must remember that developments within technological warfare has been the reason colonization and imperialism spread.
I hate the “good guy with a gun” position, but in regards to invading forces, it’s best to be prepared for what may come. Sun Tzu said “he who wants peace must prepare for war”.
What we’re seeing in the theater of war in Ukraine right now is how warfare will be waged currently as well as in the future and as such we want rather to lose robots than trained personnel, or even civilians.
The new war of attrition will be one of chips and metal. There’s nothing we can do about that really, except build defense systems, drones and robots made to counter or even cancel out invading drones and robots.
But make no mistake: Pandora’s box cannot be closed again. All the evils have been released - and you can’t shove them back in the box.
We’re not losing robots though. that’s the thing. This isn’t drone on drone warfare. This is drone on civilian and soldier warfare.
And that’s the exclusive future for this technology.
That’s what we decided was better than simply stopping all wars by enabling nuclear proliferation.